China’s ‘secrets’ indicate how far it needs to travel to gain greater respectability.

It is any wonder that the United States with its open system and a generally free flow of information finds it difficult to trust some of the people it has to deal with?

China, striving hard to emerge as an economic superpower, is a good example of why so much has to be taken with a grain, make that a whole box, of salt in dealing with foreign countries.

Ross Terrill, author of “The New Chinese Empire,” makes some strong points in a recent article in the Los Angeles Times.

He points out that Communist Beijing is struggling to save Leninism with consumerism but is badly hindered by the lack of an elected leadership and a free press.

One key example he cites about the Chinese tendency to sugar-coat things to its advantage involves a 1976 earthquake that struck Tangshan, east of Beijing.

Writes Terrill: “Scientists around the globe knew it was huge. But Beijing hid the truth, refusing offers of assistance from the United States and the United Nations, although China needed help. Only years later did the government reveal that the quake had killed more than 240,000. … How many of the bodies dragged from the Tangshan rubble would have been kept alive if Beijing had put saving lives above saving face?”

Adds Terrill: “AIDS became a major problem in China, not in Shanghai and Beijing where ‘decadent’ Western tourists were bedding ‘innocent’ Chinese youths, but in the poppy-growing country of southwest China near the Maynmar border. Blood-selling in rural China made the drug-related AIDS problem worse. At first, Beijing told the world China had no AIDS cases at all.”

All the while, of course, America was being “sold” to the clueless Chinese people as the source and propagator of the disease.

Now there is the terrible impact of SARS, which apparently had its inception in China and threatens not only that but many other nations. Secretive China could have fostered a world scourge by withholding information.

SARS broke out last November in southern Guangdong province. Beijing’s response was similar to its handling of AIDS: Little news, blaming of non-Chinese when possible, and understating the cases.

“For months, the Chinese party-state did not report the puzzling respiratory illness to the World Health Organization or its own medical chiefs across the country,” Terrill said. “Highly infectious, the virus jumped from south China to Hong Kong. Before the WHO wrenched details from Beijing, it had spread to a dozen countries with deaths climbing. Today, SARS is in 27 countries, at least half of the rising death toll (about 500 at last count) is in China.”

Concludes Terrill:

“When truth and power issue from a single fount, the safety valve of free expression is denied, corruption soars as few care to blow the whistle and medical science has one hand tied behind its back. Turning the hose of information on and off at the Politburo’s whim in a complex society of 1.3 billion people, if managed intelligently, may extend the regime’s life. But where only a diktat from on high can determine what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ ‘safe’ or ‘dangerous,’ enormous risk is run.”

This from a giant nation that complains that outsiders do not take it seriously enough and which demands things from others, such as the United States, which only help it perpetuate its tyranny and deceit.

Little wonder America considers such secrecy one of the ultimate betrayals of trust.